Fat Loss

I’ve surpassed my 120 day streak of logging my food and counting calories using MyFitnessPal! That’s over 4 months time! Or a third of a year! Woooo! To celebrate, I wrote this article to help y’all.

Calorie counting was a hassle of some sort in the first week or so but it very quickly became a habit. It’s totally become second nature and in fact, I enjoy it a lot because it gives me so much peace of mind! 🙂

I’ve never micromanaged my diet before, but you guys… this is incredible! It has allowed me to eat anything I want and lose weight because as I’m eating it, I just whip my phone out, open the app and add the food in. And the reason I could eat a donut is because as long as I’m within my calorie-limit of the day, I’m going to eventually lose some weight anyway. (How much you eat is more important than what you eat for most of us!)

Here are some tips that have helped calorie counting become second nature…

1. The MyFitnessPal app on iPhone/Android is really handy. Way faster than logging the food on the actual website! I don’t think I would have been able to keep this up if I didn’t have the convenience of putting it on my phone.

2. Log what you eat immediately, don’t delay! Otherwise, you’ll forget, trust me! I tend to eat a number of different things everytime I go to eat something, so even if just half an hour passes, I will probably forget something. As a result, I’ve made it a habit to log the food immediately, sometimes before I even eat it.

3. If you overeat today, don’t beat yourself up because tomorrow is a new day! Just because you overeat today doesn’t mean it’s the end of the world. If you simply eat less the following day it will all even out. So in other words, what you eat overall in the week is more important than that single day.

4. Know what 1 cup and 2 cups of water looks like in your favorite bowls. Fill a standard (8oz) cup with water and then fill your favorite bowl with it. Note the height of the water so you know what 1 cup looks like. Then fill another cup of water in to know what 2 cups of water looks like. Do this with the bowls you use often. (This is also why I love bowls over plates these days.) That way you don’t have to bust out the measuring cup every single time. As a result, my ability to eyeball what a half cup, cup and two cups of food looks like has gone up. Way up.

5. Get a food scale. Recently I started using a food scale to understand how much meat I’m actually eating. It’s hard to eyeball whether that piece of steak is 6oz or 10oz if you’re not used to it. (That’s a difference of 220 calories!) Obviously I don’t use the food scale to weigh my cheerios and almond milk because those can be measured in cups easily, but I do use it for meat/beef/chicken/turkey and veggies sometimes (cause a cup of broccoli can vary dramatically based on how finely it’s chopped.) Here’s a link to some really great and affordable food scales from Amazon.

6. Round up your portions! If you’re trying to lose weight, overestimate the food you eat. For example, if you think you ate a little more than 2 cups of a soup, just round it up to 2.5 cups. We tend to naturally want to underestimate these figures so that we fit a little bit more food in the day, but that’s just messing with progress. Don’t lie to yourself. 🙂

7. Round down on the exercise! If you exercise and tend to eat back your exercise calories, this is possibly even more important than rounding up your food because MFP sometimes grossly overestimates the calories burned. So if you went cycling for an hour and a half, just say that you exercised for an hour! Plus, to make matters worse, a lot of people think they are working out harder than they actually are. So don’t choose “vigorous” cycling if it truly was “moderate.”

8. Don’t avoid logging your food intake on “cheat” days, even if you know you ate 5,000 calories. So there you are, eating at a deficit Monday through Friday and the weekend comes and you start overeating because you’re out with friends or family. These are the days where you will want to avoid logging in because you don’t want to face the reality. But no! Don’t feel ashamed! Be honest with yourself. Just log it! Even if you think you ate 50 different appetizers and it adds up to 5,000 calories, just do a quick-add of 5,000 calories. If you can keep logging in your food on days you purposely overeat, then that helps ensure the habit!

9. Take your food with you in preportioned containers. Nowadays before going out for the day, I take five minutes to take food from home with me. I already know what I’m going to eat for lunch by 8am because I’ve taken the food with me! And I just log that stuff in the morning before I even eat them so I’m set!

Pro-Tip for PrePortioned Meals

Ever since I started using the Tupperware “Vent N Serve” containers, I totally understand the fascination with Tupperware now. The plastic they are made of is extremely thick. There’s nothing flimsy about them. Their lids are extremely strong so I never worry about the food opening up in my pannier bags while I’m bicycling somewhere (unlike gladware crap). They are safe for the freezer and when I need to microwave the food, I just pop the vent hole open and throw it in. The neat thing is these containers I use are either 1 cup or 2.5 cup sizes, so it’s super easy to know if I’m eating 1 cup of rice or what have you.

Summer is coming. You know what that means? All those sweaters and pants you’ve been wearing have effectively been hiding your winter fluff. (Yeah, let’s call it fluff cause fluff sounds better than FAT.) So once you start wearing lighter clothes, you’re going to naturally want to go back to your summer-weight.

So it’s been about 2 months and I’ve lost a little more than 10 pounds. (If you want to read how I’ve been doing that, read “Anto’s Counting Calories.” This post is an update from that.)

I didn’t think losing 10 pounds would be a dramatic difference. Going from 180lbs to 170lbs is just a 5% difference. Yet people who don’t see me regularly keep telling me I am looking “smaller” and “stronger” like as if I’ve lost a lot of weight. But then I tell them, “It’s just ten pounds!”

Then another friend of mine mentioned I was looking slimmer and I again said, “Well thanks but it’s just ten pounds.” And she was like, “Ten pounds is a lot! That’s a sack of potatoes!” And the words “sack of potatoes” got stuck in my head cause a sack of potatoes are pretty god damned heavy when you’re holding on to them.

I looked it up and a normal sack of potatoes are 5kg or 12 pounds. So yeah, wow, that’s kind of a big deal! I lost the equivalent of a sack of potatoes off my body. Damn that’s cool.

And the benefits are pretty nuts. I could hold crane pose indefinitely now. I could stand up from the floor without using my hands much more easily. When I dive off the board, my hurdle is massive. No wonder I finally surpassed 20mph average speed on a solo bike ride the other day. No wonder I’m flying higher than ever before on the traveling rings and my joints feel amazing!

So yeah, wow! Ten pounds didn’t seem like much. That mere 5% was a big deal. Who would’ve thought!

Me during big family dinners now. I can eat whatever I want on my cheat days.

Listen, most people don’t have a problem with eating too little, and if they do, this article is not for them. This is for the people who love to eat. I love to eat, too. In early 2013, I went on a diet. I had never been on a diet before. I started calorie counting and trying to stay within a certain range. As a result I’ve learned a lot about myself so I will share this info.

I’ve learned one of the easiest ways to lose weight is to stop eating food late at night. The reason this works so well is because it’s very likely that you’ve already ate all the calories you need to eat already by nightfall. Anything you eat after 6-7pm is quite likely to be excess!

So it’s 10pm and you are feeling peckish, but you’ve already had enough food for the day. What do you do? How do you stop?

“Early to bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise.” -Ben Franklin

Sleep: For me the best thing to do is to go to sleep. Usually the longer I stay awake, the more likely I’m going to eat something. It’s like shopping, the longer I spend in a store, the more likely I’m going to find something I want to buy. Not sleeping enough in general also messes with your appetite and makes you crave sugars and whatnot as well.

Floss and brush your teeth. We don’t particularly want to dirty our teeth after we do this and it’s a good signal to the brain that eating is over with.

Drink a lot of water. Drink sparkling water. Drink tea with no sugar in it. Anything to help keep your mouth busy to help with the oral fixation. It also helps stimulate the stomach and make it feel like it’s got something to play with. Besides, we often confuse thirst with hunger.

Eat in your underwear looking at yourself in the mirror. I doubt you’d gobble up brownie after brownie in this scenario. (Relax, I say this more in jest than anything else.)

If you must eat…

Often times we just want to munch on something. We have an oral fixation we just want to fulfill. We want to keep our mouths busy. We might get bored and just gravitate toward the kitchen and start opening the pantries and fridge. Yeah, we all do that from time to time. However, it’s important we don’t make a habit of this. And if it’s a habit already, then maybe we should replace it with a fresh habit.

A good rule of thumb is to eat stuff low in sugars and high in fiber so it feels filling.

Go for some vegetables… Grab some red/yellow/orange bell peppers and slice them up. You wouldn’t believe how filling a bowl of that stuff is. Or maybe bite into a delicious tomato. Put some pepper on it to make it yummy. How about some cucumbers? They’re SO refreshing. (Or how about tomatoes and cucumbers, whoa!).. But seriously, veggies are awesome. Broccoli and cauliflower are dank too. And so on.

If you are in the mood for fruits, be careful: Fruits contain lots of sugars! A single banana is 100 calories and can be consumed in just a minute! A single orange can be 70 calories. A tiny half cup (a mere 4oz!) of OJ is 60 calories.

So what kind of fruits is one to eat? BERRIES! Strawberries, blueberries, blackberries, raspberries! Berries are extremely low in sugar, yet somehow they taste so delicious! Check this out:

Fifty blueberries are just 40 calories. Freeze them and pop them in your mouth one by one.

Ten medium strawberries are just 40 calories.

Ten raspberries are just 10 calories.

A bowl of 50 blueberries, 10 strawberries and 10 raspberries would still be less calories than a single banana! (1 banana=100 calories) Now don’t get me wrong, I love bananas and even make “ice cream” with it, but it’s 10pm and we are trying to be conscious of how much we’re consuming, right? RIGHT!

Another food that helps you just munch on stuff without consuming too many calories is popcorn (go for the plain popcorn). It’s also a nice snack to just pour a cup (only a cup!) of plain cheerios into a bowl with no milk and just eat them one by one.

Early on I realized I eat about 2,500 calories a day and easily go over 3,000.

When I first poured 1 serving of cereal into a measuring cup to see what 1 cup was like, I realized I eat not just one but several servings of cereal in the morning.

Good thing I’m extremely active! If I wasn’t, I’d definitely be racking on the fat, especially for my age (nearly 30 baby!). I realized I’ve been eating A LOT, especially on the day following after an intense bike ride.

I’ve decided to curtail my intake of calories and see where that takes me. Calorie counting has opened my eyes into understanding that…

a) I do a considerable amount of snacking between meals and all that adds up.
b) Completely filling my plate puts on way more food than necessary.
b) I love dark chocolate covered almonds.
c) Eating less than you’re used to for the first few days makes you cranky and your extremities will feel cold. (Thankfully that was very temporary).
d) Eating less makes you poop a lot less. (Science!)
e) Eating slowly is very gratifying.
f) And last, we Americans, OVEREAT LIKE MOTHER FUCKERS.

So anyway, I’m about 2 weeks into this. MyFitnessPal has been the combination iPhone app/website I’ve been using to record everything. As tedious as calorie-counting is, that app makes everything super easy. If the food I’m eating is packaged, I just scan the bar code and enter the # o servings. If it’s home-made, I find something comparable and just enter it.

Protip: I often pack my lunch at home in the morning and I log it right then and there since I know I’ll be eventually eating it, so I don’t have to open the app later on. Also if I have something like… say, a candy bar or a sandwich and I only eat half of it, but I know I’m going to eat the other half later, I simply record that I ate the full thing from the get-go so I don’t have to enter it twice. This helps makes everything a lot more streamlined and efficient.

What are my goals? I don’t have any numerical weight-goal. Body measurements are more important to me than weight so I wrapped a cloth measuring tape around my thighs (24″), waist (34″) and hips (35.5″). I’ll see what it’s like every few weeks I suppose.

I’m just going to do this until I feel like I’m a little bit leaner and lighter. Hopefully by then I’ll have a very good idea of what <2,000 calories really feels like because I sure as hell underestimate it at the moment. I will continue my yoga practice and hopefully with time my giant thighs won’t be as giant and inversions will be less tricky as well. 🙂

Update on March 18, 2013

So over 7 weeks of logging caloric intake and checking the scale, I’m able to figure out my true basal metabolic rate with the exercise I regularly do. To maintain my current weight with the exercise regimen I currently do, I should consume 2,230 calories.

This is how I figured this out…

MyFitnessPal calculated originally that my Caloric Intake (with 2lb loss per week; 1000 calorie deficit per day) should be at 1620.

Over 7 weeks time, I averaged out to that figure almost to a tee (just 500cal less than the goal).

If 3,500cal are one pound then 500cal means 0.15lbs so it’s insignificant.

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